Moonlight (2016)
★★★★☆
Moonlight is a very different gay coming-of-age movie by Barry Jenkins and it will break your heart.
Black filmmakers
The Birth of a Nation (2016)
★★★★☆
The Birth of a Nation is director Nate Parker’s emotional condemnation of America’s brutal history of slavery through the true story of one man who led a rebellion.
Chi-Raq (2016)
★★★★☆
A dazzling rap musical against the epidemic of gun violence amongst Chicago’s black communities, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq is sensational.
Festival Review: Chi-Raq (2016)
★★★★★
A dazzling rap musical against the epidemic of gun violence amongst Chicago’s black communities, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq is sensational.
Selma (2014)
★★★☆☆
A powerful dramatisation of Martin Luther King’s final battle, Ava DuVernay’s Selma is a moving account of the march on racism and the man behind the movement.
Fruitvale Station (2013)
★★★★☆
The powerfully dramatised true story that recreates the last day of a 22-year-old black man, Oscar Grant, shot by railway police in the San Francisco Bay area on New Year’s Day 2009.
12 Years A Slave (2013)
★★★★★
A searing story of slavery in 19th century America, based on the 1853 memoir of a free black man from New York, who is abducted and sold into slavery in the South.
The Paperboy (2012)
★★★★☆
Exposing Sixties race relations in the sultry heat of a Florida summer, Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy is a hothouse of lust and violence.
Shame (2011)
★★★★★
Michael Fassbender is at his leg-tapping best in Steve McQueen’s Shame, a tale of lonely frustration, sexual addiction and grim redemption.